RFK Jr.’s Organic Crusade Has Sparked a Weird Political Realignment

In October, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. stood outside the United States Department of Agriculture headquarters and railed against the state of US agriculture. Big farms, pesticides, and feedlots were all part of a system that he said was destroying the health of Americans. “When Donald Trump gets me inside the building I’m standing outside right now, it won’t be this way anymore,” he said in a video uploaded to YouTube.

President Donald Trump did not get RFK Jr. inside the USDA. Instead he nominated his erstwhile opponent as Secretary of Health and Human Services, a role which will put Kennedy—if confirmed—in charge of vaccine policy, science funding, and public health. As HHS secretary, RFK Jr. would also be the most prominent supporter of organic farming in any recent administration, albeit one with limited access to the levers of power in agriculture, almost all of which reside with the USDA.

Even as an outsider, Kennedy’s vocal support of organic agriculture—and its central role within his Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) campaign—cements a realignment in the politics of organic farming. Eating organic has long been associated with left-leaning, Whole-Foods-tote-wielding urbanites. Now its biggest proponent is at the heart of the most right-wing US government in decades. In this shift, some groups spy an opportunity to place organic farming at the heart of the MAGA narrative—while others are concerned that RFK Jr.’s obsession with organic poses a serious risk to the climate.

That this realignment is happening at all is testament to Kennedy’s strangeness as a political figure. A longtime environmental lawyer at the National Resources Defense Council, he’s fought against water polluters and coal miners. His 2005 book Crimes Against Nature criticizes George W. Bush for allowing corporate interests to capture the US government and undermine environmental law. “The administration is systematically muzzling, purging, and punishing scientists and other professionals whose work impedes corporate profit taking,” he wrote in the book’s introduction. “The immediate beneficiaries of this corrupt largess have been the nation’s most irresponsible mining, chemical, energy, agribusiness, and automobile companies.”

Now Kennedy is vying to join an administration headed by a president who has dismissed climate change as a hoax and whose nominated energy secretary is currently CEO of one of America’s largest fracking companies. But RFK Jr.’s brand of environmentalism already eschews the main focus of the modern movement: carbon emissions. “Democrats have been subsumed in this carbon orthodoxy,” he told Tucker Carlson in August. “Everything is measured by its carbon footprint … And the reason we protect the environment is just the opposite of that. The reason we protect the environment is because there’s a spiritual connection.”

RFK Jr.’s embrace of organic—a vaguely defined approach to farming that shuns pesticides, herbicides, and artificial fertilizers and emphasizes soil health—aligns him more closely with the worldview of so-called “crunchy” environmentalists: suspicious of processed food and nostalgic for a vision of farming that harkens back to a simpler, more rural way of life. At his hearing on Wednesday, RFK Jr. thanked the “MAHA moms”—many of whom share his suspicion of vaccines as well as his dislike of pesticide and genetically modified crops.

It also puts him on a collision course with people who worry that a switch to organic crops would make it much harder for the US to achieve its climate goals. Organic crops tend to produce less yield per acre, thus requiring larger areas of land to grow the same amount of crops, which in turn increases carbon emissions and threatens biodiversity as more land is converted to agriculture.

On January 14, environmental research group The Breakthrough Institute published a letter opposing Kennedy’s confirmation as HHS secretary. The letter cites as a warning the Sri Lankan government’s April 2021 decision to switch to organic farming, which led to plummeting yields, skyrocketing food prices, and protesters storming the presidential palace. The Sri Lanka chemical ban was encouraged by environmental activist Vandana Shiva, whom RFK Jr. has described as a “hero” and a “role model.”

If he is confirmed in the HHS role, RFK Jr. will have limited influence on agricultural policy, says Emily Bass, associate director of federal policy, food, and agriculture at Breakthrough. But he would have oversight of the Food and Drug Administration, which enforces regulation of food in the US. “Pesticide residue limits are something that he could certainly influence with his regulations,” says Bass. And “limiting use of genetically modified crops, or more strictly monitoring their existence in the food supply, is something that could create a chilling effect on agricultural production.”

The HHS secretary also oversees the National Institutes of Health, which funds and coordinates medical research in the US. Bass says Kennedy may try to direct the agency and the FDA to produce research into pesticides and food additives that is then used to support litigation trying to change how the US farms. This might shift the FDA away from being an explicitly regulatory agency to more of an activist organization.

His ability to do any of this is likely to be constrained by Brooke Rollins, Trump’s pick for USDA chief, who is seen as a very conventional candidate for the role. Rollins’ chief of staff is Kailee Tkacz Buller, the former president and CEO of the National Oilseed Processors Association. RFK Jr. has consistently attacked oil seeds, writing on X that “seed oils are one of the most unhealthy ingredients that we have in foods” and directing followers to buy hats with the slogan “Make Frying Oil Tallow Again.”

In her confirmation hearing, Rollins indicated that she’d follow the president’s line on agriculture, and President Trump is unlikely to want to upset the farmers and agriculture industry figures who are his natural constituents. “I work for him. I am a cabinet member,” she said at the time.

There are already signs that conservative lawmakers are warming to organic farming. “Historically we haven’t gotten a lot of interest from the more conservative-leaning members of Congress,” says Gorden Merrick, senior policy and programs manager at the Organic Research Farming Foundation, a nonprofit that advances research into organic agriculture.

Now, Merrick says, he’s having a lot more meetings with “very conservative” legislators. “A lot of them did say they’re interested in hearing more about organic because of the influence of RFK and the growth of Make America Healthy Again.”

Pro-organic groups are also shifting how they speak about organic farming in order to appeal to the new administration. America imports a large amount of organic produce, says Kate Mendenhall, executive director of the Organic Farmers Association, a nonprofit that advocates for organic policies in the US. Growing more organic crops domestically will boost farmer’s incomes and US jobs, she says, and the growing demand for organic produce means that there is money to be made from getting in on the organic hype.

Although Kennedy’s support for organic is bringing new followers into the fold, this emerging coalition is still fragile. Organic consumers might lean left, but Trump has overwhelming support from American farmers. Only around 1 percent of US farmland is certified as organic, with the vast majority of farmers reliant on monocrops, feedlots, and pesticides, exactly the kind of farming practices that RFK Jr. opposes. If he did try to tighten up rules on pesticide residue or ingredient labeling, it’s not clear that the majority of farmers would back him.

There is another problem facing this uneasy political pairing. At his confirmation hearing, RFK Jr. struck a conciliatory tone, telling senators he isn’t anti-vaccine, but his dangerously inaccurate views on vaccines, autism, and HIV are well known. Having such a loose cannon in the administration may end up alienating both left-wing supporters of RFK Jr. and more conventional members of Trump’s cabinet, leaving Kennedy and his unusual organic coalition adrift once more.